The problem is only intermittent. I don't want anyone to waste time on it!

I have now installed VL7 from the Live CD on 2 older laptops. I pretty much took the defaults through the install and both machines I had a good user experience at first. I'm using Xfce. I created one primary user for myself so I do not login as root (or vl) and a guest user. On both machines I have successfully connected to the internet - both wired and wirelessly.

Then, on the older machine after start and login as me, I got these messages: Could not connect to wicd's D-Bus interface. Check the wicd log for error messages.

The wicd daemon has shut down. The UI will not function properly until it is restarted.

It seemed possible that the network card had failed. It is an old machine after all. So I accepted that I would use that one as a standalone machine.

A week or so later on the newer machine, and after a number of successful internet sessions, after startup and login I got the same wicd messages! It seems too strange a coincidence that this network card has also failed.

So I found a thread on the technical forum from which I was going to try some things like: ls -la /etc/rc.d/rc.wicd

And I was going to look at the log in /var/log/wicd/wicd.log . Now the really strange things start. Even sudo would not let me see that log ( I used less ).

And then, after shutting the machine down for a while, I restarted and DO NOT get the wicd error messages.

Sorry this is so long winded. I know intermittent problems are hard to resolve but I would be thankful if anyone can help with this.

Thank you, Mark, for your explanation of what was happening. I, also, have experienced these issues while I was trying to setup a couple of machines to get back into Linux. I thought mine were my own lack of knowledge and, with other problems, have reverted to VL6.

At present, it is handling my computing needs with one exception: I have a major spreadsheet that the spreadsheet offerings in Linux can't handle and Wine (at least on my machine) can't handle Excel (Office 97). I still need to try the one in Office 95.

My current project is to setup another machine for a friend. Once I get the hardware set up, I'll see if I can get VL7 to work for him. It should be a piece of cake for him as his needs are letters and simple spreadsheets.

Your experience is similar to one I had. I forget what happened, think I installed then uninstalled something and had an issue where wicd did the same thing..I could log in as root and restart, and other times a reboot seemed to solve the issue..temporarily. I finally reinstalled and have not had the issue since then. just to let you know you are not alone in the experience. and my solution...cheers